Call to match cuts in logging with reduced woodchipping

The environment movement is calling for guarantees that woodchipping will be reduced in line with the State Government's 31 per cent statewide cutbacks in logging.

The environment movement is calling for guarantees that woodchipping will be reduced in line with the State Government's 31 per cent statewide cutbacks in logging.

The movement, which also wants an end to all woodchip exports, is concerned that logging for woodchips could still increase under the guise of forest improvement, or through diverting low-grade sawlogs that might otherwise go to sawmills.

The announced cutbacks relate only to sawlogs supplied to sawmills. Timber for woodchips is considered a byproduct of clear-felling for sawlogs, and is not included in the sustainable yield calculations. Therefore, areas logged for woodchip timber alone are not included in the calculations.

These operations are still considered "sawlog-driven" because they are intended to encourage regrowth of quality timber.

Premier Steve Bracks said last week he expected woodchipping to reduce along with the sawlog cutbacks, but Lindsay Hesketh of the Australian Conservation Foundation said the jury was out on whether that would be the case.

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He said woodchip volumes had gone up since the Bracks Government took office, while sawlogs declined. He said there would be no increase in sawlogs relative to woodchip as long as clear-felling continued.

A spokesman for the Wombat Forest Society, Tim Anderson, said local forests were squandered through chipping logs suitable for small mills or for firewood. The Midlands region is facing a 79per cent cut in sawlogs, and the society wants the export woodchip company Midways out of the forest. It says a new approach to low-grade logs is vital.

A spokesman for the Environment and Conservation Minister, Sherryl Garbutt, said the situation would be constantly monitored, but it was a vexed issue.

He said that even in plantations 60per cent of timber ended up as woodchips or sawdust. Demands to defer logging in contentious coupes also meant putting crews into poorer forests with a higher ratio of woodchip timber.

He said the government was focused on getting the industry on a sustainable footing and assisting the transition to better technologies to value add more low-grade timber. He said it was in the government's interests to increase royalties by selling timber for value adding.